


garden state of mind

by orphan_account



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics), Harley Quinn (Comics), Poison Ivy (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Flower Shop, Angst, F/F, Minor Violence, Past Domestic Violence, Pining, harleyivy week, harlivy - Freeform, his impact is important, ivy owns a flower shop and harley is a customer and things happen, leslie is a cameo in the last chapter, the joker isnt actually in this but he may as well be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-18
Updated: 2016-09-25
Packaged: 2018-08-15 19:44:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8070247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Ivy only cares about the plants in her flower shop.(Until she doesn't.)Harley's whole world is her Puddin.(Until he isn't.)





	1. as far as im concerned, if it isnt her it isnt here

**Author's Note:**

> the original title of this was Garden State (Gotham is in New Jersey, aka the garden state, this is a florist au, i think im clever, etc. turns out there's already a movie called garden state, so i tweaked it a little. 
> 
> as you may note from the summary, this fic is for harlivy week on tumblr. it covers the prompts for day 1 (firsts), day 2 (alt universe), day 5 (flowers), day 6 (past lovers... that will come into play later), and day 7 (free day). 
> 
> this first chapter is a little short, oops. chapter title from if it isn't her by ani difranco.

It was raining when Ivy first saw her. 

 

Rain wasn’t a rare occurrence in Gotham; in fact, it was as common as the shady-looking characters wearing their pants low and hats backwards, the mugging headlines in the Gotham Gazette, the debris littering the streets. It as ever-present as the weeds springing up from the cracks in the cement sidewalk outside Ivy’s shop. 

 

Harley was decidedly less common. 

 

The little bell over the door chimed, Ivy’s head snapping up in a Pavlovian response, a quick glance towards the door. 

 

A girl  was standing in the doorframe, arms folded across her chest, shivering slightly.  She looked like she was collapsing in on herself, like if she could squeeze her own arms to her chest hard enough she’d implode, turning into a vortex that sucked the store in along with it. Ivy was already captivated. 

 

The girl not yet known to Ivy was damp, blond hair in pigtails that were coming undone and sticking to her face and the sides of her neck. Her grey tank top was damp from the rain, sticking to her body and slightly revealing the outline of her bra. She was wearing a red hoodie with holes in the elbows, unzipped, that hadn’t done much to shield her from the rain. Ivy noted how her heart-shaped earrings matched her red and black fingernail polish, which alternated every other nail. A color scheme, Ivy guessed. And dedicated to it. 

 

She was gnawing intensely on her lower lip. It looked red and swollen, the mark of a common bad habit. Her gaze, when she cast it about the room, was fervent, her eyes flicking back and forth. She had the gaze of a doe, a doe’s eyes, Ivy remembered thinking. No, that wasn’t right- A rabbit. They were blown wide, slightly glassy but still present- fearful, but perceptive. 

 

Hunted. Hunter. 

 

Ivy stepped out from behind the counter, and noticed in lieu of her usual conjured facade, an aura of legitimate happiness had caused her to smile. 

 

“I’m Ivy, how may I help you?” 

 

Ivy let her hands fall by her sides, as if presenting herself. The girl made eye contact with her, eyes widening in what IVy perceived as fear before offering a tentative smile. Ivy felt a surge of protectiveness for this nameless girl. She wondered vaguely if she had a blanket in the back; the girl looked cold. It wasn’t a warm rain. 

 

“Hiya. I’m Harley.” The girl- no, Harley, Ivy amended mentally- looked about the room, before her eyes fell back on Ivy. 

 

“I’m looking for some flowers. Roses, maybe, red ones?” She stared at the floor. “They’re for my Puddin’. Cuz I’ve got to say sorry.” She was mumbling. 

 

Ivy frowned. “Red roses, huh? Generally reserved for those you love.” 

 

Harley looked up, smiling bashfully. “My Puddin loves me. He does, really. Has a funny way of showing it, is all,” she said, choking up a little. Ivy ducked behind a shelf, grabbing a small potted rose plant. She had bouquets, but in all honesty she disliked them. They were so pedestrian, not to mention the death of the flowers. This girl, though, was worth a special arrangement. 

 

“He’d have to be crazy to not appreciate you,” Ivy said genuinely as she presented the plant to Harley, who beamed as she took it. 

 

It was a youngling. A domestic rosebush, in a shiny green pot, only just budding. Harley prodded one of the buds with a chipped black fingernail. 

 

“Well, maybe not all that, about me,” she mumbled, “but the plant certainly is nice.” 

 

Harley dropped her hand, looking up into Ivy’s eyes. “How much do I owe ya?” 

 

It was a simple question, but there was something so earnest and intense in Harley’s tone that Ivy felt her mouth open and close without replying, like a fish. 

 

“On the house,” she sputtered. Harley frowned for a split second before cracking a wide, toothy grin. 

 

“Thanks, Red,” she said, winking at Ivy as she turned towards the door. Ivy thought it was a cute nickname, referencing Ivy’s very obvious fiery ginger hair. Maybe Harley had thought it was cute, too. Or maybe she’d forgotten Ivy’s name. 

It didn’t matter. 

 

“No problem, anytime!” Ivy laughed after her. “Always a pleasure to help fix a relationship.” 

 

Harley was standing in the doorframe again, peering out into the grey haze. 

 

“Oh, Red… There’s a lot these flowers won’t fix.” She sounded solemn, but not pitiful. It was like there was something or someone out there waiting for her that would just as soon greet her with gnashing teeth and gnarled features as give her a smile. 

 

Before Ivy could formulate a reply, Harley was gone, like a ghost, leaving in her wake only the echoing ringing of the bell above the door and in Ivy’s ears, and faint scent of strawberries and smoke. 


	2. been looking for something, oh no, to carry me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> far harleyivy week day 2 and 3 (AU, which is sort of a blanket for this fic, and "bad girls gone good" respectively.)   
> The day 3 prompt is a bit of a stretch, i know. 
> 
> chapter title from 'all this wandering around' by ivan & alyosha.

The second time Harley came into the shop, she was sporting a particularly nasty looking black eye. 

 

It wasn’t raining, this time.. On the contrary, it was a bright and sunny day, a rare thing in Gotham, atmosphere cloaked in a warm and humid haze, as if the air itself was trying to cling on to the last coattails of summer. 

 

Harley wasn’t the ray of sunshine she’d been the first time she’d shown her radiant face in Ivy’s shop. She was still every bit as lovely, but looked the worse for wear. In addition to an inky purple bruise over her left, discoloration and swelling creeping down the side of her face, her bottom lip was swollen. It looked as if it would have split had she been hit just a bit harder- and Ivy shuddered at the thought, a deep nagging pain chewing in her gut, her heart hammering, wanting to run to Harley and kiss the wounds away, clutch her against her body, swallow her whole, for her protection. Or, even better- to take a mallet, a shovel, a garden hoe, and bash in the face of the person who’d done this. 

 

She inhaled, trying to replace the red she was seeing with green. Breathe out- blood, rage, hate, no control falling falling falling into her feelings and- Breathe in. A deep, earthy scent, filling her lungs with soil, weighing her down- chalky brown roots, the gentle trickle of water fueling them, growing into the ground beneath her- steady her weight, now, one foot in front of the other. Anchored by these imagined roots, stabilized. 

 

“What happened?” She asked, sounding so calm. She sounded more sure of herself than she felt. Ivy tended to do that- project an aura of ultimate competence as a sort of barrier between herself and her feelings, or, even worse- other people’s feelings, getting too close. Right now she wanted nothing more than to let her voice crack, to be vulnerable, like the cement when a root tore through it. 

But she would be strong for the girl in her entryway, who couldn’t be. 

 

This was probably too intense of an emotional wave at the sight of a girl she’d met in person only once before, but there it was. She felt like she knew Harley, like they’d been together in a past life- reincarnated from what had been trees with branches entwined, a pair of merging lives at this, a bloody swollen intersection. 

 

Harley took a shaky breath. 

 

“It-” she hiccuped. “It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault, it’s not my fault-” she inhaled, choking on the air, breath coming in shaking, shuddering gasps. She cut herself off, beginning to sob. Harley wrapped her arms tight around herself, like she was a puzzle that would fall apart into a million little pieces if she didn’t keep herself together, physically, with the sheer force of her toned arms and the will to make up physically for what she had already, emotionally, let slip. 

 

Ivy stepped out from behind the counter, and she was standing by Harley within a few long-legged strides. 

 

Ivy wasn’t the best at comfort. This she knew, if nothing else. She was self-aware, self-serving, restrained, cold, reptilian- amphibian? Botanical?- or so she had been described, by a countless number of people. She’d need more than every petal in the shop to tally up the men who had curled their lips at her in rejection, the women who side-eyed her and whispered  _ bitch  _ in breaths intended to be just loud enough to hear. It stung like a bee, a wasp, a hornet, a yellowjacket, all the sharp things. 

 

But Harley was here, crying, and she couldn’t be cold anymore, She had to take a leap. Climb that tree, find the highest branch, jump off it. 

 

She embraced Harley. Not some trifling one-armed thing, no- she enveloped the bawling girl in her arms, Harley burying her face into Ivy’s soft green sweater, which smelled like earth and dirt and home. 

 

“I’m sorry,” Harley managed to get out between heaves of tears. “I can’t do it anymore.” 

 

She pulled away, wiping at her runny eyeliner with a chipped red fingernail. Ivy pictured Harley putting that eyeliner on that morning, not knowing what would become of her face later that day- the bruise was fresh. She saw in her mind an image of Harley, in linen-white pajamas, hair pulled back with a series of clips and bands, standing on tiptoe in front of the mirror as she pulled various brushes and liners across her porcelain face. 

 

Ivy wondered how much of that image was true, though even more how much she’d give to be able to find out. 

 

“I’m glad you came here,” she said, almost crying herself for a reason she couldn’t name. 

 

“I had nowhere else to go,” Harley replied, a raw earnesty in her face, pleading. 

 

“You are always welcome here.”  Ivy gestured about the shop, rows and rows of greenery and multicolored blossoms, big hulking potted trees in the corners. “The place could use another living thing that doesn’t photosynthesize. Sometimes I forget I’m even human.” 

 

Harley cracked a smile. “More like an ethereal being. Maybe an angel.” 

  
Ivy chuckled to herself. “That’s a first.”


	3. you will find someone who will love you like you deserve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Final chapter of this fic. A little longer than the others. Hope this wrapped things up satisfactorily.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title from 'peach' by the front bottoms (was only a matter of time before tfb happened, knowing me.)  
> Fills the free day, past lovers, au, and flowers prompts.

Together they saw another rainy day. 

Ivy had let the shaken other woman sleep in her apartment. In hindsight, Ivy thought she was probably more grateful than Harley had been, despite not being the one put to the streets for the cold unforgiving night to chew up, spit out. (Or, worse, swallow. A night as dark as Gotham’s? When it swallows you, there’s no climbing back into the light from the blackness of its throat.) 

 

They say hindsight is twenty-twenty. 

 

Ivy’s apartment was right above her shop. She remembered offering her couch to Harley. Harley’s face had pulled into a mask of confusion, maybe at the fact that there was still kindness at all in the world, and for once directed at her- but it soon melted into relief, appreciation. Ivy’s flesh burned at the memory of Harley’s porcelain hand gripping her wrist as Ivy led them out the back, up the staircase that climbed up the back of the chipped-brick building. Both the building and the stairs had seen better days, but then again so had Harley. 

 

Ivy remembered the flush of her cheeks when Harley had gushed at her cramped, sparsely furnished apartment. She’d happily claimed the couch- a futon, stuffing bursting from one corner- even though Ivy had warned her it was worse on the back than a bed of nails. All lumps and poking, creaking springs, and she’d pleaded with her to just take the bed instead, really, Ivy would be fine on the couch. But Harley would hear none of it. 

 

(The second night, they ended up in the same bed, and they woke in a tangle of limbs and hair, and even though Ivy had kicked the blankets to the floor in the night she felt warm all over. She wondered what it was about Harley that made her always feel like she was burning.) 

 

That second morning, it had been on the brink of raining for the past two days. The morning sky was overcast, a dismal grey, but Harley’s hair was golden as the currently-invisible sun, and they laughed and made eggs in their underwear. Harley burned her finger on the pan, pulling t into her mouth to nurse her wound, laughing all the while, and Ivy knew that she was warmer. 

 

It turned into a routine of this, before either of them really noticed. Harley felt more at home with Ivy, nothing but her phone charger, a few clothes in a duffel, and a dollar-store toothbrush than she ever had with Him- Ivy called him the Joker. 

 

Her face had been set in stone when she blocked his number from Harley’s phone. Harley hadn’t wanted to do it. 

 

“He feels like everything’s a game. Like some joke on me,” she’d confessed once, when he had called screaming, leaving threats on her voicemail. 

 

Ivy had locked eyes with her, expressionless, grabbing the phone away. 

 

“It’s a game two can play,” she had promised. 

There were no more calls after that. No more texts, either. Ivy removed him from every trace of Harley’s life, both digital, physical, and, well. The mental they were working on, an ever-improving structure with cracks in the foundation that needed filling. 

 

A head was not a building, though, it wasn’t quite so ground-up. 

 

A mind was like a plant, Ivy had told her one day, tending the vines down in the shop. Harley had taken up helping Ivy run the shop- part because she wanted to pull her weight, part because she wanted to grow on Ivy like some sort of human fungus, and part because Ivy really did need the help. 

 

Ivy’s hands deftly and delicately pushed aside thick green foliage, prodding soil and root with her fingertip. 

 

“We have more in common with them- the plants, you know- than we realize,” Ivy had hummed, almost caressing the tender green thing. Like a lover, like a child. 

“We all start out as a seed, and we grow, and sometimes- sometimes our foliage comes tinged with brown, our branches...diseased, and we have to cut the old dead parts out. But we grow back, stronger, more alive.” 

 

She looked at Harley, locking eyes. 

 

Harley folded her arms, propping herself up, leaning forward on the counter. 

Her mouth parted slightly. 

 

“You’re beautiful when you talk, Red,” she said softly. 

 

Ivy smiled, setting down her watering can, approaching Harley. An observer, from her strides, their smiles, might have gathered there was some sort of magnet pulling them towards each other. How they looked at only each other, like they were the only thing in the world. 

 

Ivy’s lips were tracing the pulse on Harley’s neck when the bells above the door chimed, signaling a customer, and the two women pulled apart- but only barely. Harley’s arm loosely wrapped around Ivy’s waist, Ivy’s hand resting on Harley’s thigh, as both women turned to the door. 

 

An older woman walked in. She looked exhausted, but she carried it with a refined sort of grace that only someone who had seen the world, carried it on her shoulders without dropping it, and lived to tell the tale could. She wore a white coat with a name tag, reading “Leslie.” From the looks of her, a nurse. 

  
  


She glanced around the shop, then smiled over at the women at the counter. She showed no teeth, but it reached her eyes; they crinkled up into something familiar, evidenced by her crow’s feet. 

 

“You two are adorable. You both work here?”

Ivy blushed at the ground; Harley nodded with enthusiasm. 

 

“Aw. How’d you meet?” She casually surveyed some plants near the counter- potted violets. 

 

The pair spoke simultaneously, mirth in both of their eyes. 

 

“She bought some roses,” Ivy said. 

 

“I got hit in the face,” Harley said. Then she erupted in a fit of giggles, quickly followed by Ivy. 

  
Their guest’s eyes widened in confusion. The look wasn't caught by either of the ladies- they were laughing, deep and full, eyes sparkling like dew on morning grass, arms wrapped around each other, like tangled vines. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come visit me on tumblr at rosewileson.


End file.
